Compartmentalization & the Excluded Middle

Compartmentalization & the Excluded Middle

Explaining American Culture to Global Partners IV

“All of our lives, the white man has been telling us there is no such thing as spiritual warfare, demon possession, curses, or witchcraft. We nod and we smile, but when he leaves the room, we look at each other and say, ‘that man has not had enough experience to know any better.’” -National leader from Zambia

For my last three blog entries, I have been trying to offer some perspective on how American culture, especially church culture, works for our brothers and sisters around the world who partner with us in the expansion of God’s kingdom. There is much about American culture that does not make sense to those of us who live in it. How much more confusing must we be to outsiders? However, because we are disproportionally wealthy, and because we are a large country with few people living close to an international border with another country, we are one of the least self-aware countries on the planet. We do not realize it, but we expect people from other cultures to adjust to us. Instead, true adjustment looks more like a two-way street. Much of the adapting people from other countries do to us, though, may happen without deep understanding. They may know how we are, but they rarely know why we are that way.

Many of the cultural traits that mystify non-Americans are related to our tendency to compartmentalize. This is my second effort to unpack some of what this means. Last time, I addressed money and designated funds. Today’s topic is much harder to address. As a culture, we have a massive blind spot when it comes to the spiritual world and how it interacts with the physical world we inhabit every day.

Sometimes, missiologists call this gap the “Excluded Middle,” meaning that large arena of life between God’s transcendent spiritual reality “in the heavenly realms” and the material world humans inhabit. For most cultures throughout time and space, there was no such gap. The spiritual and physical worlds were thought to overlap and constantly impact each other. A few centuries ago, as the discipline of empirical science developed, Western countries became dominated by people who perceived and perpetuated a huge gap between spiritual and physical worlds. Many denied the reality of a spiritual world or redefined it to be merely metaphorical (meaning dealing with emotion and/or purpose, motivation, or values). This group assumed that the spiritual realm was not “really real.”

Those in the West who held on to the reality of a spiritual world found themselves out of favor with the dominant forces in education and culture. They typically retreated into a cultural ghetto and/or accepted the massive gap between spiritual and physical worlds.

Those who took this route, including Alexander Campbell and most of the American Restoration Movement leaders, ended up believing that God stopped doing anything outside of natural laws once the age of the Apostles ended. They believed that in the past God acted in power, and he will again at the end of time. However, he does nothing today except by way of providence, which is a slippery concept meaning a long chain of cause and effect that only looks miraculous to us now.

This means that for many people from Western cultures, the spiritual and physical worlds do not meaningfully overlap. They are in completely different compartments with a huge gap between them. This leaves no place for God or other spirits to work in our world today. Thus, we have the excluded middle between God’s transcendent heavenly world and our physical world.

 The churches in which I grew up were fully cessationist (a big word that means God has ceased working directly in our day). We prayed because we were commanded to do so. We asked God to help us, but we had no real expectation he would enter our time and space and do anything outside of the natural chain of causes and effects we could measure with empirical tools. This trade had some advantages – it offered us some relief from fears that we could be cursed by our enemies and harmed by some evil spirit, but it also left us alone to navigate life with little more than a book of instructions about morality, how to perform religions services that pleased God, and some wisdom for living well. But we were on our own when it came to deciding how to apply this to our own lives.

 In reaction to the void created by this view, various charismatic fellowships have cropped up in the USA and offered people a way to experience God’s power. But many of these groups fostered spiritual abuses that grew naturally among people who were not well formed spiritually and who were overly influenced by Western individualism. Frequently, they turned spiritual gifts into personal validation, spiritual status, or performative displays. The gatherings of those who welcomed spiritual gifts easily turned into “Show and Tell” competitions. To avoid these abuses, many “rational” people avoided anything that looks “charismatic.” But the human hunger for spiritual help and experience is relentless, so it did not go away.

For people who are outside the West, who do not compartmentalize life like we do, and for whom a spiritually active world is a given, they are often at a loss as to how to deal with us. They have been taught ideas by Westerners which seem patently ridiculous to them. But they cannot just ignore well-meaning people who show up with resources wanting to work with them. Neither can they openly talk about what they really believe around us. Those in that context who have been convinced (often by us Westerners) to accept cessationist beliefs can end up becoming irrelevant to their context and find it an up-hill struggle.

Over a decade ago, I had a leader in West Africa ask me, “How do we defeat the Pentecostals?” When I inquired why he asked the question in such a harsh way, he expressed frustration that his people kept migrating to churches that offered them not only forgiveness of sins and heaven after death, but also an active Holy Spirit’s power to deal with the challenges of this life. I suggested to him that this would keep happening until his church learned about the power of God to work today in healthy ways. We don’t have to embrace abuses of spiritual power to trust that it is real. In retrospect that is just as true for American churches or churches in any part of the world who have lost confidence in God’s active power today.

There is far more than we can unpack in this sub-topic of a sub-topic, and we will continue in future blogs. However, if you are a church leader outside the West who is bewildered about why people from my culture seem blind to the ongoing activity of the spiritual world today, please do not be intimidated into silence or withhold your questions and experiences from us. We need help to understand the spiritual world from our global family. Please do not wait until we are out of the room to talk about things we do not understand well. Your perspective is exactly what we need. We need to hear your voices and need to include them in our understanding if we are going to overcome this excluded middle in our own lives, churches, and ministries and experience God’s power for us today.